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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
To move away from a dogmatic allegiance, from a commitment to a worked-out system of beliefs, is not unusual today; nor is it unusual, having done this, to retain a profound conviction about the power and richness of the tradition underlying the theology. Many people can no longer assent to Christian theology—not only to the theology they have known, but to any theological system—and yet they may still want to read the Bible and other Christian literature, and, perhaps, to participate in the liturgy. From an older and more established viewpoint their position is curious, even dishonest, for it seems an evasion of the responsibilities of belief and commitment that the Bible and the liturgy are all about. To say this often enough, however, is to provoke an answering attitude which remarks, in tones of pragmatic commonsense, that there is nothing wrong in this at all, for surely the Bible is to be read and the liturgy attended; if the Bible is being read and the liturgy is being attended, then all is well; for the fact of the continuing response not being tied automatically to a dogmatic allegiance does not in itself invalidate the response—whether it does or not is a question which directs attention to the kinds of response which the Bible and the liturgy themselves seem to demand. And to put it like that is to pose not a theological, but a critical, question.
To recognize the question thus is to move much nearer to the non-dogmatic person who isn’t starting out with a set of preconceptions called beliefs. That this person continues to attend to the Bible and the liturgy should suggest areas of meaning which the predominant orthodoxies have not taken into account, but of course the very perplexity of established dogmatism at the sight of this new type of reader or participant comes from an inability to entertain this possibility: what the Bible and the liturgy mean is what theology says they mean—surely there is nothing else! To this point of view the newer type of response is necessarily meaningless.
page 319 note 1 For an example of what happens when literary criticism does consider the Bible, reducing the work by evading the central questions, see Henn, T. R., The Bible us Literature (London, 1969)Google Scholar.
page 320 note 1 Leavis, F. R., Lectures in America (London, 1969), p. 23Google Scholar.
page 321 note 1 Leavis, F. R., English Literature in Our Time and the University (London, 1969), p. 7Google Scholar.
page 322 note 1 What we haven't tackled properly is the question of faith’, one of the editors of Slant said to me. My suggestion is that it is the same question.
page 322 note 2 Of course I don't mean that there has been no critical activity in the past. The importance of the homily or the practice of meditation testifies that the tradition has been sustained by it. But I still think the general analysis is right, that criticism is abused, and that its importance needs positively to be worked out and asserted.
page 324 note 1 Leavis, F. R. in Dickens the Nocelist (London, 1970), p 236Google Scholar.
page 324 note 2 F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University, p. 50.
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